Prior art cardiac monitors often contain a feature which stores short segments of a patient's waveform for events detected by the prior art system. These events, commonly called a recall event, may be viewed at a later point in time which may be more convenient, or a history of the patient's events may be viewed in a single session. One problem frequently exhibited in traditional arrhythmia recall strategies is in the procedure for replacing recall events already stored by the system by new, more recent events. Often, the system will require the user to peruse the recall events or manually edit out the undesired events. Another prior art approach is to always place the new event in the place where the oldest event is kept, i.e., has been kept.
The most important characteristics associated with recalling events are typically:
the type of event; PA1 the number of events of that type; PA1 the age of the event.
No known system employs the aforementioned three typical important characteristics to compute, on a priority basis, that event which has the lowest priority and which would be replaced by a new event. It would mark a definite improvement in the art to provide a recall system which employs the aforementioned three important characteristics in order to maintain a constantly updated record of the events which would be able to provide a better representation of a patient's arrhythmic activity. The present invention provides such a system.